Il 21/10/22 11:38, Heiko Schlittermann ha scritto:

Steff Majeur <afamiliartaste@proton.me> (Do 20 Okt 2022 11:24:49 CEST):

I recently stumbled upon the following commit on the Dovecot core Github repository:
https://github.com/dovecot/core/commit/4a187116dc2311804be22724007d357323005358

Apparently, Dovecot Director is going to be removed in the next major version of Dovecot and the commercial Dovecot cluster architecture will be its successor:
https://github.com/dovecot/documentation/blob/a85b742ec4fc2744db30a6943b3c25f004e46720/source/admin_manual/cluster/index.rst

This would be a huge blow for many organizations around the world that are currently using Dovecot with Director in a shared storage environment.

We - the communitiy - are free to continue development of the director.
Especially large organizations should re-think their ideas of getting
free software for free.

I fully agree with you that companies should not associate "free software" as free/gratis, and many are already doing so (see RedHat, which produces "free software" and all its customers who pay for technical support).

And I think that even those who work on the development of Dovecot are right to be paid.

But something different happened here, Open-Xchange removed an important piece of free software code from Dovecot, for no technical reason, and replaced it with a commercial "closed" software solution that is OX Dovecot Pro.

All this shortly after the release of a new major release, thus guaranteeing only a limited time of support to those using the Director, with the only possibility of purchasing their commercial solution.

Director is not only used by large companies but also in small installations consisting of 2 servers and cannot be immediately replaced with Nginx as it has to manage the user/backend association for POP, IMAP, LMTP, Managesieve.

Unfortunately this news is very far from the "Stay Open".

-- 
Alessio Cecchi
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